Observations from a day of menswear-shopping

-Men's clothing stores have exactly the same impact on me as the theme music to "Frasier" or "The Bob Newhart Show," which is to say, I feel an urgent need to fall asleep. Something about Banana Republic especially, although it was in the more upbeat Topman that I finally collapsed onto what was, I think, some kind of display lamp, but rectangular, and thus vaguely bench-like. Maybe the drab horribleness is particular to the US, where the idea is that masculinity is asserted by dressing in a way that suggests that one finds clothes-shopping torturous?

-What happened to lower Broadway as a tourist destination for French people? Where was the c'est pas cher brigade, with their bursting shopping bags full of relatively inexpensive Adidas? Probably something to do with the euro's relationship to the dollar.

-When the Yelp reviews of a bagel place say the bagels will be tiny and expensive, they will be both of those things. It's not often that I've regretted walking a couple short blocks out of the way for a bagel, but... let's just say the hipsters didn't need to reinvent bagels. The supposedly inauthentic, puffier bagels of Bagel Bob's and so forth are far, far better than what Nolita's offering. (Yes, yes, "and the portions were tiny." But they were!)